Perle's horizons; Meet Richard Perle

"If I were an Israeli I would resent people calling on ther Israelis to risk their lives so that they can live in place rather than other place."

"The Saudis have the money to buy a bomb and I think it’s only a matter of time."

"I’m very dubious about punishing hapless civilians in socities where somebedy else is making the decisions."

MICHAEL OREN and BRET STEPHENS:
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Perle's horizons

It is the second day of the Jerusalem Summit, and Perle is to be awarded a prize in memory of Henry "Scoop‘ Jackson, the late Democratic US Senator from Washington for whom Perle worked as an aide in the 1970s. We meet around midday in his King David hotel suite, with a terrific view of the Old City walls. Inevitably, our three-way conversation comes around to the subject of ’Richard Perle" — not Perle himself, but the creature of the deep that rises when one types in his name on a Google Internet search. It yields the following:

"The vilification doesn’t bother me especially,‘ Perle tells Michael Oren, author of last year’s bestselling Six Days of War. ’As it becomes more extreme it actually troubles me less." But that isn’t entirely right.

"When it comes to the BBC I really do get angry,‘ he says in answer to a question about anti-Semitism. ’I used to appear on the BBC twice a week. And then they did a piece called ’The War Party’ on Panorama in which they used music and shadowy photography. We were portrayed as a bunch of shadowy conspirators and that was beyond the limit for me so I no longer talk to the BBC."

Indeed, whatever else Perle may be, he isn’t shadowy. Mild-mannered, affable, pudgy in late-middle age, it is his candor as much as his reputed influence with the Bush administration that makes him so interesting. Here is a man who might be taken for Donald Rumsfeld’s or Paul Wolfowitz’s or Dick Cheney’s intellectual doppelganger. The difference is that Perle is not so constrained by considerations of political or bureaucratic tact. He says what he thinks. And what he thinks, one suspects, is what George W. Bush thinks, or what he will think, sooner or later.

Oren: The Israelis are saying this is a security boundary, not a political boundary. The Americans are insisting that it is, in fact, a political boundary.

Perle: If it looks like a security boundary it’s a lot easier to defend it as a security boundary. The shorter the fence the better because fences have to be controlled. I think the settlements have to be looked at settlement by settlement. And there are some settlements that pose a security challenge. If I were an Israeli I would resent people calling on other Israelis to risk their lives so that they can live in this place rather than the other place. I’m certainly not ready to give blanket support to every settlement. If people want to risk their own lives, that’s their decision. To ask others to risk their lives — the society as a whole should have a say in that. …

One of my problems with the settlement issue, sadly, is that it has become in many ways a test of wills. If you abandon settlements it looks like a defeat and it runs the risk of encouraging people whose objectives go far beyond the elimination of settlements. Could you abandon settlements today without greatly encouraging the jihadists? The withdrawal from Lebanon was a catastrophe.

Oren: There are 200,000 settlers, not talking about the neighborhoods around Jerusalem. About 150,000 can be put in blocs…. Then you have far-flung settlements, Gaza settlements, that are categorically indefensible. You are talking about 50,000 people.

Oren: Faith. The further out you are, the more faithful you are. There’s a settlement [Itamar] where I once did reserve duty. I saw a big banner over the entrance. It said,"In our entire lives, we will never leave here.‘ But it also meant, ’We will never leave here alive,"and you get that message. These are the guys who are going to stick, they’re going to shack up and hold out with M-16s and they’ll fight."

Perle: Well, they have greatly complicated Israel’s problem. If you’re compelled to defend the indefensible, then you’re really on the horns of a dilemma.

Oren: I think I’ve heard or read two different positions of yours on the Road Map. There seems to be divergence there. One is that you are basically supportive of the Road Map….

Perle: I think what happened is that the failure to take up June 24 in a serious way gave the State Department the opening it needed to walk it back. They were horrified at the State Department by the June 24 speech. It was a radical break with previous American policy. So they began working on the Road Map, which was sold as an implementation of June 24, when in fact in many respects it is inconsistent with June 24.

I was rather hoping that the Road Map having emerged, it could be reshaped. But I don’t think that’s going to happen. The essence of June 24 was first you transform the Palestinian Authority, then you get support for a Palestinian state. The Road Map says begin the transformation of the Palestinian Authority in ways that are reversible and we will start marching towards that Palestinian state. June 24 was event-driven and the event was the transformation of the Palestinian Authority. That was never going to happen quickly. I had been hoping when it first surfaced that the inconsistencies would be pointed out and that Israel would drive it back in the direction of June 24.

Stephens: We interviewed Sharon yesterday. A month ago the cabinet decided to remove him at a time of its choosing. Now the prime minister seems to be ruling that out unequivocally. The only thing to do is to wait him out.

Perle: If you’re going to wait him out, then why not isolate him totally diplomatically?

Stephens: In fact, that’s what they attempted to do. Sharon would refuse to meet with foreign ministers but that policy applied only on the same trip.

Perle: That’s absurd. It’s a caricature of the real policy. And in any case it doesn’t go far enough. I think the policy should be, if you and your country are giving in to Arafat then you and your country will have nothing to do with us. If you send your minister of trade to Arafat, forget about sending any minister to us.

Now if you do that, then people will have to make a choice. If you say to Javier Solana that I won’t welcome you back to Israel if any of your people meet with Arafat, what do you think the Union’s response will be? The one thing the EU can’t stand is irrelevance.

Perle: Then very well. We will never know if Abu Mazen could have gotten some traction [in the absence of Arafat]. Everything should have been concentrated on getting Arafat out of the picture and it wasn’t done.

Perle: The justification was never restricted to weapons of mass destruction. The president talked about regime change very early on. The regime change argument was eclipsed by the weapons of mass destruction argument partly because the Department of State was always uncomfortable talking about regime change… [because] that it is outside what is today the accepted notion of legitimacy in international terms…. But weapons of mass destruction and violations of UN resolutions are a solid basis for reaction and the State Department gravitated toward the legally correct view.

If someone were to go back and look at all of George Bush’s statements on Iraq he would find that at a certain point he stops talking about regime change and talks almost exclusively about violations of UN resolutions, some of which, by the way, centered on human rights. Not all of them centered on weapons of mass destruction.

Now that’s been forgotten and I hear it said all the time that the basis was the weapons of mass destruction. In any case, we know that Saddam had a weapons of mass destruction program. Although we haven’t found stockpiles, I don’t believe that Saddam was significantly less dangerous because he didn’t have a stockpile.

The reality is that in the aftermath of September 11 Bush became seized with the idea of not waiting too long. The problem was compounded by the decline in support for the containment policy, which was no longer merely containment. The sanctions regime was falling apart….

There was the very real prospect that Saddam was going to emerge as a great hero, having outlasted the sanctions regime, having outlasted the West, having violated the cease-fire, any number of UN resolutions and getting away with it and this became increasingly intolerable. So we had to do something. The fact that we have not found the stockpile in no way diminishes the justification for taking that action….

Perle: Well I think we may find some. It’s possible that some were removed from Iraq, and it’s possible that some were destroyed shortly before. We’ve already learned enough about his capacity to produce, to draw the conclusion that as long as he was in power, he was a threat.

Perle: The ability to leave Iraq in a reasonable period of time with a reasonably stable and much better government and some serious prospects for economic growth and development and well-being for the Iraqi people….

Oren: You could still have a wildcat situation like Beirut in 1983, where one of these suicide bombers kills a large number of American servicemen. Were the Republicans to lose the presidential election and a Democrat to come into the White House, do you see the Democrats using such an event as a pretext for withdrawing from Iraq? Let me phrase it differently: Are you confident that America’s involvement in Iraq is not solely a Republican program?

Perle: Oh yes, I’m confident of that. No responsible American administration would pull out before that place is stable and on the path to a decent government.

Oren: Would there ever be an American interest in seeing three different states emerging from Iraq — Sunni, Shia, Kurdish — each allied to the United States, each serving a different purpose in the region?

Perle: I don’t think so…. I see nothing but external meddling if you have separate states….

Things in Iraq are getting better by the day. And that’s true even if there is a car bomb this afternoon. These car bombs are unlike other car bombs. Nobody is standing up and saying Owe did this and here’s the reason why’ because they don’t have anything to say that will resonate with other Iraqis. They are basically Saddam’s people with a little outside help from terrorists….

A judicial system is now being set up in Iraq. Courts are functioning. And these people are going to be tried and hanged.

Oren: The common wisdom before September 11 was that America was a paper tiger about to collapse. All it needs is a little shove. And that attitude has completely changed. No one says Americans are afraid anymore.

Perle: You’re quite right. The terrorists believed we would disappear at the first challenge. They’d seen us withdraw from Lebanon. They’d seen us withdraw from Somalia. They’d seen Israel withdraw from Lebanon. They’d seen us fail over and over again in response to acts of terror. The conclusion they drew was that they could win by terrorist means in the war against the United States, which they regarded as the obstacle to their demented ambition. You can’t fault them for coming to that conclusion.

Perle: Syria is itself a terrorist organization. America should be much tougher on the Syrians…. There’s a leak coming out of Washington which seems to come from the Treasury that there is a substantial amount of Saddam’s money in Syria and some of it is being used to finance these acts of terror in Iraq.

Stephens: If that is substantiated, do you think it will prompt the US to take action against Syria?

Oren: Regarding Saudi Arabia: You have two contradictory images. You have Bush giving his June 24 speech on the Middle East and then you have him, almost in the same week, bopping around his ranch on a pickup truck with the Prince of Saudi Arabia. Can you pursue both things at the same time? Can you fight terror and not fight the sources of the terror, the financing of it?

Perle: No, you’ve got to fight the sources. And I believe we’re doing it. I believe the president knows perfectly well what the Saudi role is. And he knows he must get them to stop. The way to get them to stop is not so easy. There is no single approach. I don’t think he has any sympathy for the Saudis.

Stephens: People here talk about the prospect of a Saudi bomb. Is it realistic?

Perle: Yeah. They have the money to buy a bomb and I think it’s only a matter of time.

Oren: About two weeks ago they showed on Israel television an HBO production about a tour de monde of the Islamic radical world, starting with the West Bank, Gaza, southern Lebanon, Pakistan, Afghanistan. And they took you into these schools where tens of thousands of young Muslims are studying. It really focused on the women. And you saw these kids being instructed in the importance of dying as martyrs and transforming themselves into human bombs.

One very pointed theme in southern Lebanon was kids getting their heads sliced with razors so that they can march around and reenact the massacre and then they had them drawing pictures of dismembered martyrs. Little kids with red crayons filling in the blood and the viscera. I came away thinking that I don’t really grasp what we’re up against. And the question I’d ask you then is how are the American people going to ever really grasp what they’re up against here?

Perle: Well, they got our attention on September 11. So people are open in a way that they weren’t open before to trying to come to terms with it, to trying to understand it. It’s a confusing picture because you have a lot of cliches about Islam which are truly irrelevant because there is a reality we would have to be concerned about even if Islam were a peaceful religion. And the unity of the terrorist threat is only now beginning to be understood.

So how do you get people to understand it? You’ve got to start with leaders who understand it. And I haven’t seen a lot of insight on the part of leaders, including those leaders who should understand it better than anyone else — Israeli leaders. The Left and Right.

What was wrong with Oslo? There was a long list of things wrong. But one of the things was that it was allowed to coexist with this kind of radical teaching. And at some point somebody should have said you cannot have a peace process on the surface when under the surface children are marching with wooden rifles instructed in the virtue of killing Jews, of killing Israelis. You could have said No, there will be no negotiation while that goes on. That’s fundamental. Israel didn’t do that and doesn’t do it today. And it shows. But everyone wants to look the other way because it does present such a challenge to the negotiating….

Oren: This is the deep-seated Israeli theory of the trickle-down process of peacemaking.

Perle: Well they’re wrong. Trickle-down peacemaking is tactical maneuvering. So you enter into agreements without any intention of either honoring them or accepting their result as a definitive result. It’s a step in the process of the destruction of Israel…

Stephens: But the task goes beyond making sure the Palestinian Authority stops funding or tolerating incitement. The problem is a culture that in some very basic way has gone berserk. Take Abu Mazen. Here’s a guy who stands up in Aqaba and, in Arabic, gives a speech about ending terrorism and incitement, about a Palestine that is "a qualitative addition to the family of democratic nations." And the instant effect is that his popularity among Palestinians drops to one percent.

It’s very difficult for governments to face realities in which there is no hope. Governments will reach out to some idea that there is hope. What I liked about the June 24 speech is that it was a challenge. Whether it had the capacity to rally opinion among Palestinians to get beyond one percent, to get to five percent and then 10 and 20, I don’t know. We didn’t give it a decent chance.

The Road Map is business as usual. The old diplomacy. It doesn’t make the kinds of demands that will force the Palestinians to face the question and forget about whether they come up with the right answer. They won’t come up with the right answer until they face the question…

The State Department doesn’t see the big picture and it never will. So the hope is on the president and I think Bush has come closer than any other person.

Oren: Between February and May 1945, the Allied forces bombed Dresden, Berlin, Hamburg, Tokyo. They inflicted far more casualties than they did later at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There was no strategic value to these bombings. The war was essentially over. The impetus behind these bombs was simply to deliver a message: "In case you didn’t get it, this kind of behavior is unacceptable." As callous and cruel as it sounds, it worked.

Perle: I’m not sure it did work. You’ve always got to ask, who are you delivering the message to? It really took Hiroshima to persuade the Japanese that it was hopeless. It was the notion that it was hopeless, not the notion that they were being punished and in the German case it didn’t work at all. I don’t know about Dresden, but there are studies that show that production and morale went up, certainly in the UK.

In any case, in today’s world of precision weapons you can destroy military power without destroying a large number of people. We just did it in Iraq. So I’m very dubious about punishing hapless civilians in societies where somebody else is making the decisions….

Oren: The punishment the US inflicted on its enemies in World War II came from a sense of rage at Pearl Harbor. Is American society — and this is a question I’ve asked about Israeli society — capable of rage? Are we capable of being driven to savagery? Are we capable of waging all-out war?

Perle: Yes, we’re capable of rage and the next terrorist act will produce it. September 11 produced it.

Perle: Well, it was controlled, but believe me, the support for going after the Taliban and even for going after Iraq was very strong for that reason. The chattering classes don’t experience rage.

Stephens: There’s a story told about Bush’s visit to the World Trade Center, right after the attack.

He was chatting with some hard hats, and he looked at this one guy and said, "What can I do for you?"

And the man said, "You go find whichever m--f-- did this and you kill him and his wife and his mother and his children and his dog and everyone who so much as served him a cup of coffee."

Perle: That story sounds right to me. You know, a lot of our guys in Iraq carry around pieces of the World Trade Center. The chattering classes are talking about the relationship between Saddam Hussein and 9/11. These guys are under no illusions. It’s all part of the same war.

Oren: I’m writing a book now. The book is called Fantasy, Faith and Power, a comprehensive history of America’s 200 years of involvement in the Middle East. One of the aspects of that involvement is the contribution of American Protestants — their connection to the Jewish people as a major motivating force for American involvement. When I look at someone like Scoop Jackson I always want to ask myself, where did that come from?

Perle: I think I know where it came from. It came from his own roots as a son of Norwegian immigrants. His father was a trade unionist. He was president of the local card-carrying union organization. Scoop was devoted to the values of liberal democracy and he was profoundly affected by the Nazi invasion of Norway.

The lesson he drew from it was that the small progressive liberal democracy which was way ahead of much of the world in terms of social justice was invaded and occupied in a matter of days and his conclusion was that you have to be strong. Small countries are vulnerable. He used to compare Israel and Norway — countries that had achieved a great deal but were vulnerable.

So it starts with that. As a congressman he attempted to enlist in the army and was prevented from doing so. Congressmen were told to remain in their role in their elected offices. But at the earliest opportunity he joined the American forces, not as a soldier but as a member of Congress and he was present at the liberation of Buchenwald . And you don’t forget something like that. Within a matter of days he signed a letter which was circulated in Congress concerning the establishment of a Jewish State.

He was driven by a sense of values. He hated totalitarianism — left and right — and his involvement in Soviet Jewry flowed from that. People wanted to leave and were being prevented from leaving and he wanted to do something about it. As luck would have it, the moment the Soviet authorities moved to curtail immigration, the Nixon administration had a piece of legislation proposing trade concessions to Moscow and Scoop caught this opportunity and that was the beginning of Jackson-Vanik.

Perle: No, quite the other way around. I had never been to Israel. I had never paid much attention to Israeli matters. Scoop used to say with great pride that he had helped me to discover my roots as a Jew and he did. He was extraordinary.

? Are we capable of being driven to savagery? Are we capable of waging all-out war?

Perle: Yes, we’re capable of rage and the next terrorist act will produce it. September 11 produced it.

Oren: I’m more struck by the absence of rage.

Perle: Well, it was controlled, but believe me, the support for going after the Taliban and even for going after Iraq was very strong for that reason. The chattering classes don’t experience rage.

Stephens: There’s a story told about Bush’s visit to the World Trade Center, right after the attack.

He was chatting with some hard hats, and he looked at this one guy and said, "What can I do for you?"

And the man said, "Help the widows and orphans."

And Bush said, "No, what can I do for you?"

And the man said, "You go find whichever m--f-- did this and you kill him and his wife and his mother and his children and his dog and everyone who so much as served him a cup of coffee."

And Bush said, "You won’t be disappointed."

When Bush came to Atlanta a little while after the WTC, a friend of mine in the police dept. (you know who you are) asked him about this and GW assured him he was, "Going to do it right!".

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